


open season

by qwerty24



Category: Serenity (2019)
Genre: Domestic Violence, F/M, Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-18 23:54:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20321620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwerty24/pseuds/qwerty24
Summary: Karen knows what it's like to be prey.





	open season

I too have taken the god into my mouth, chewed it up and tried not to choke on the bones. – Margaret Atwood, “Eating Snake”

* * *

Treble hook to the back of the throat, Frank’s fingers pressing into her palate, nails scraping the inside of her cheek. Then – gagging, coming up for air, the burn of bile. “Good girl,” he whispers into her hair, palm hot against the back of her neck. “You can take it.”

She knows what it’s like to be prey.

He presses his mouth against hers and she yields, just a little, the taste of rum and rage on his tongue. The seashell walls, the walnut paneling, Plymouth Island, the salt in the air – _I’ve been here before_, thinks Karen. But it’s a fleeting, base thing, because in the next moment Frank has her pinned to the door, cock hard at her back. He places her hands above her head, palms flat so that she’s bracing herself.

And then, his closed fist to her back. She hears the sick thud before she feels it, two or three ribs all caught in the blow. Open handed slap to the ass. Another fist, the other set of ribs, and it almost knocks the wind out of her.

One day he will kill her. The buckle of his belt into her skull. His hand around her throat, tight, then tighter, until stars spark behind her eyes.

The bite of leather against her shoulder blade makes her flinch. Hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and still, it hurts. Frank laughs. She wonders why he doesn’t just do it now, beat her to a pulp, wring her neck, fuck her dead body. Wishes he would.

_Patrick_.

It’s this hell that’s the worst. Not the violence. Not the fear. Patrick, and what it’s done to him. Frank cracks the belt, hard. Karen flinches. He laughs. She sees her son, a different rage, the black eye which bloomed across his face. Just a child. Her child. _Fuck_, how could she have let it come to this?

John, a ghost from a lifetime ago, is why she’s here. Here in this sterile hotel room, pain radiating up her spine, blood pooling under her tongue from biting down. She can almost remember it, being with a man and not being afraid, even wanting it. There must have been a time in the beginning with Frank like that too. But now, it’s just him groping between her legs, thick fingers slick with spit, thrusting two, then three up inside her, testing her, and then his cock, all the way.

It burns, but she doesn’t give him the satisfaction of a whimper. “Fuck, baby. You’re so tight,” he groans, running his hands over the fresh welts and bruises he’s marked on her. “_Yes, daddy_,” she obliges, swallowing back her blood and bile.

He used to like to watch her struggle, grinning as she put up a futile fight. The suffering was half the fun for him. Today, she’s an obedient, pliable thing, slack between Frank and the door. Just let him use her this one last time, and tomorrow, tomorrow – he’ll be dead.

His nails dig into her collarbone, pinpricks of pain as he holds her still and cants his hips up, picking up the pace. How many times has she been here? How many times has Frank done this to her, and how many times has she let him? The danger must have felt thrilling once upon a time, but now it’s just a dull terror in the pit of her stomach. “_Good girl, good girl, good girl_,” he grunts into the nape of her neck, hot breath lighting across her skin, clammy and too close.

Frank’s other hand snakes down her body, twisting a nipple cruelly before pressing the heel of his palm against her clit, and her body is a ruthless thing because her spine stiffens, something sparking in the friction of his touch, and she fucks back, a shudder as she rises to meet him.

She remembers fourteen, her confirmation ceremony, white dress, the bishop’s crimson vestments, kneeling, and then his hands on her. She had prayed for goodness and cleanliness, for a man who could reach inside her and extricate the dark thing she could feel growing beside her heart. So she had knelt in front of the bishop, the smell of balsam and God on her lips, and could only picture getting on her knees behind the bleachers, scalding asphalt, sucking off a boy with kind eyes and soft thighs.

This is where it must have started going wrong. “Peace be with you,” incanted the bishop, and at least someone must have been listening, because she met John a year later. But that darkness never left her, clung to her like a second skin. It tore the two of them apart. And it was how Frank found her.

Her breath is coming in short gasps and she’s close, a traitorous tension coiling in the pit of her stomach, shuddering as he reaches up to brush a strand of hair out of her face. There’s a terrible threat in his gentleness: joint, knuckle and fist.

Then he pulls all the way out, laughing as her hips thrust back desperately, and takes his cock in his hand, watching her as she waits, palms still flat against the wall, bruises blooming all the way down the cleft of her spine, and comes on the small of her back with a stifled, animal groan.

Pain is one thing, but humiliation, degradation, is another.

She bites down on the inside of her cheek, tries to remember what peace felt like before.

Is this a memory or a dream?

* * *

Shark. Blood. Bite.

Bent over the gunwale of John’s boat. She can smell the liquor on his breath. _Look_, she wants to tell him, _look at what he did to me_. Her eyes follow the outriggers to the ocean. The water is inky, dangerous. She remembers Frank’s hand on the back of her head, face beneath the surface of the bathwater. Where does the ocean meet the sky?

This John should be a stranger to her. This island, unfamiliar. But her dreams are filled with fins and gills and sharpened teeth. She can feel the salt in the air in the wounds on her back. Has she been here before?

She lets him fuck her. Thinks it gives her some kind of power, thinks she’s actually doing it to him. But she’s forgotten what it’s like without the violence.

* * *

Everything is scar tissue. Her body, her mind, her memories. _Good girl_, a hundred times. Frank’s belt, a thousand. Yesterday, she was in Miami. But was she? It seems like a distant city, an image she can’t quite conjure up of imagined palm trees and skyscrapers.

He hits her, all his knuckles into her spine. It knocks the wind out of her. At least she doesn’t scream. He wants to hurt her. She almost wishes she wanted it too. This is the part that’s different. Where he touches her, where he doesn’t. Everything else, the fear, the self-loathing, the pain, it’s all the same.

She closes her eyes and imagines chumming the water, hooks piercing flesh, scaled and gutted fish.

* * *

She tastes Frank on her lips and feels him between her legs, except it’s not Frank, it’s John.

This time, it’s John. And the next?

* * *

The water is ice blue.

She wants to walk into it and drown.

* * *

Frank reaches for his belt and snaps his wrist.

She doesn’t cower away.


End file.
